Word: pnin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PNIN (191 pp.) -Vladimir Nabokov-Doubleday...
...Timofey Pnin is a Russian émigré professor who has won a Pyrrhic victory over the English language. His name itself is a sneeze in search of a vowel. His colleagues at a small Eastern college can make out Pnin's pastoral odes to "Tsentral Park," but few realize that "I search for the viscous and sawdust" is a request for whisky and soda. Devoted to the active verb and the present tense, Pnin invests the simplest acts with explosive vitality ("I never go in a hat even in winter"). In all verbal matters, Pnin would rather...
Novelist Vladimir (Bend Sinister) Nabokov, 57, himself an émigré Russian and a Cornell professor of Russian literature, does more than sound-track his hero for laughs; in unobtrusive flashbacks he captures the underlying pathos of exile. Leafing through an émigré journal, Pnin sees his dead father and mother in the lamplit serenity of their pre-Revolutionary home; stonily viewing a Soviet documentary film, he bursts into tears at a sudden glimpse of the Russian countryside in springtime...
Most of the time bald, myopic, barrel-chested, spindly-legged Pnin wrestles mirthfully with his fate even though he loses most of the falls. Bound for a lecture date, he blithely takes the wrong train after having painstakingly consulted an out-of-date timetable. Bent on being a sports-minded pal to a schoolboy visitor, he remarks chummily that the first description of tennis in Russian literature "is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875." Whenever Pnin stops talking, Novelist Nabokov steps in with waspish, high-spirited asides on U.S. higher education, culture...
...Unlike Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov learned English at his English governess' knee. His family belonged to the landed Russian aristocracy, but his liberal-minded father gave up his position at the Tsar's court, sardonically advertised his court uniform for sale, later was assassinated by Russian monarchists. As a refugee from the Revolution, Vladimir worked for a Cambridge degree, lived in France and Germany, wrote eight novels in Russian...